


the future has an ancient heart

by thisparticularlight



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 10:29:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12408630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisparticularlight/pseuds/thisparticularlight
Summary: "BJ seems to have been born to spiral outward, roots shooting down into the very basest parts of Hawkeye and leaves tangling up with the most peripheral pieces of him. What he learns is that he was wrong. Of the two of them, BJ is certainly not the simple one."





	the future has an ancient heart

When Hawkeye was a child, his father spent the entire month of April 1924 building big, beautiful wooden trellises, and his mother grew roses for three summers. The blossoms would droop and twist in the unforgiving Maine summers: heat blazing during the day and frosting over at night well into June. “Too delicate,” Daniel would say softly, reaching over to brush his wife’s shoulders with his fingers, and Adelaide would sigh, before narrowing her eyes and saying: “One more year, maybe.” It was nice, Hawkeye thought, to see his mother taking a turn at steely determination, as his father tried on gentleness. 

Hawkeye still remembers the summer that his mother gave up on roses: how melancholy it made her at first, contrasted with the brightness that came over her face each morning, stepping outside when the grass was still dewy and running her fingers over velvety wisteria. “Look how fast,” she would murmur. “It’s like it was made to grow here.”

And it was. Years later, Hawkeye, eleven years old and just beginning to feel the stirrings of a lifelong calling in the back of his mind growing up alongside a lifelong ache in the front of his heart, would sit out in the yard at night with his father’s hardcover copy of _The Human Body_. The two of them would read, mostly in silence. Occasionally Hawkeye would take a break and look up from his book to watch hummingbirds descend over his mother’s wisteria, by then thick and tangled and ancient, impossible to tell where one vine began and the other ended, until mosquitos and chill drove them both indoors.

“Dad,” he said one night, working through naming the bones in the human body, “have you ever thought that trellises are like a skeleton for plants?”

Daniel Pierce regarded his son then, as he did every so often, with a fondness which snuck into every corner of Hawkeye and which centered a warmth into him that would endure decades and continents. “I never have, but I’m glad you’ve made me.”

“They’re the structure the vines need,” Hawkeye explained slowly, not sure whether to be embarrassed, but grateful, as always, for the gentleness his father had grown into over the last decade. “And the vines make them… well, they make the trellises look nice. They give them something to do, I guess.”

“I hope that you always look at the world the way you do now,” Daniel told him, looking over his half-moon reading glasses. “You make me proud to be your old man.”

Twenty years later, thanking God and goodness for the warmth seeping out of the young man underneath him at a quarter past nine on the last night of 1951, Hawkeye tries in vain to warm his fingers before performing a delicate stitch. Two hours after that, he collapses onto the wooden bench outside the surgery room, taking one huge gulping icy breath before letting all the air sag out of his body.

_Please be proud of me, after all this_ , Hawkeye thinks, closing his eyes as 1952 creeps in. He toasts his empty hand up to the rafters of the OR tent, grateful that he is able to imagine by heart the ceiling of the dining room in Crabapple Cove, and hopes that his father is singing Auld Lang Syne loudly enough for both of them: maybe, in Maine, something feels new tonight. _Please, after all this… please still be proud of me._

+

When Hawkeye was a medical student, his father bought him a subscription to National Geographic. Every once in a while, he imagines Colonel Flagg meeting his father and wrinkling his nose immediately, knowing that the US Army has mostly Daniel Pierce to thank for the trivia his son is now able to pack into any number of jokes in any given shift. 

As with many of Hawkeye’s most delightful characteristics, however, Korea has only amplified traits that have their roots deep in a childhood in Crabapple Cove: Hawkeye Pierce has been annoying the snot out of unsuspecting onlookers with knowledge of the natural world long before he would have been able to point to Korea on a map.

_Bamboo, an evergreen perennial flowering plant, can grow at rates exceeding an inch per hour_ , he remembers telling an attending physician once upon being asked a question about _growing pains_ , of all damn things in the world. _So perhaps we should tell that to Milton. If nothing else it might help him to know that he’s not alone in his place in the world._

He’d brought it up to Carlye that night. _Growing pains, really. I mean, in fairness, I imagine it would be pretty tricky to grow so gangly. Poor Milton._ And then he’d told her about bamboo.

“Really?” she’d asked, and he’d nodded with the goofiest grin on his face as he’d swept her into a jangly waltz across their kitchen. 

“Really really. An inch an hour! That’s over two feet per day. Fastest growing plant on earth,” he’d recited dutifully, remembering all at once how he’d met her in the morning on a football Saturday in October in New England, staring at the way the vapor of her tea hung in front of her face, and by nightfall he was staring at her across the library lounge, totally unable to remember what it had been like to be unaffected by her mouth forming the words “fourteen yards” as the sunset scattered diffractions across her sunburned face through centuries-old plateglass windows. Fastest growing, indeed.

Across the twin arcs of ten years and the Pacific Ocean, it’s fascinating the things that Captain Hawkeye Pierce, defender of country and connoisseur of small details, can remember. The shade of lipstick Carlye Walton was wearing that first night in the library with their friends, and how it offset her hairpin? Yes. The score of that day’s football game, Harvard vs Princeton? Unimportant, and yet: yes. The strange, unexpected way that something that grew so rapidly could also fade so quietly, and the lifetime of questions that the growth and the fade brought? Yes - oh, yes. Yes.

\+ 

When he was sick with how much he liked BJ Hunnicut - and oh, but he was, at the beginning - he would think to himself: _of the two of us, you are the simple one_. And he liked that: liked BJ’s stark simple goodness, juxtaposed against all of his own stupid quickness and complication, and all of Carlye’s declarations of how they could be so, if he would just. How lovely it must be, he thinks to himself at first, to be simple. To work hard, to move forward in a straight line: career, wife, house, baby, guided all the while by the straight arrow of kindness and patience. _Slow and steady._

And so it caught him rather off-guard to have fallen so gaspingly in love with all of the layers filtering BJ Hunnicut into something altogether unclear. _A bit of a bait-and-switch_ , he thinks, wryly, looking over at BJ, bent studiously over the stove as the curve of his back throws shadows across the Swamp. _I’ll allow it. I forgive you._ He’s lovesick. It’s awful. 

Eventually he realizes that there are actually no straight arrows in BJ’s life ( _the jokes_ , he scribbles frantically into his journal, careful to eliminate the setup but desperate to, on the other side of this hell, remember the punchline, _write themselves_ ). What presents itself as straightforwardness is actually, Hawkeye suspects, simply BJ’s vast confidence that all around him, life is unfolding as it should.

Which is a frankly fascinating thing to contemplate. Especially here.

What would it be like to know - in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary - that whatever lurks beneath the surface is a thing to be trusted? It is becoming increasingly clear that BJ trusts himself to write sweet letters to his wife and to let his fingers brush the back of Hawkeye’s neck in the same afternoon. This, too, is fascinating. Hawkeye finds it impossible to imagine BJ not feeling the same sparks that shoot into his own mind when the other man’s strong hands sweep over his nape (not even he hates himself that much), so what gives? It would seem, somehow, that the difference between Hawkeye and BJ is simply, after all this, that BJ trusts the sparks.

Hawkeye spends months trying to figure this out, and at the end of everything he comes back to growing up ( _because isn’t that how it goes_ , he thinks to himself wryly), and to the trellises. Back to 1924, and back to the hopes pinned into every nail his father drove into the crossbeams, and back to everything that lived and everything that didn’t.

Because here’s the thing: throughout all the twists and turns he comes to memorize about the hairpin turns of BJ’s life, fingertips along Hawkeye’s neck not the least of them, BJ never loses that stark, simple goodness. Instead it’s as if the hot, unadorned desire vines wildly all along the trellises of BJ’s goodness, coming nearer and nearer each time - hungry looks in the showers, warm thigh pressing up against the length of him in the mess tent - to sagging under its own weight if not for the unforgiving angles of the underlying skeleton: kind words whispered as warm breath to patients into the uniquely cold air of the OR after midnight, and the last piece of bread saved for Hawkeye back in the swamp after long days. Where it gets blurry is where the goodness and the desire meet: songs, jokes, touches. Unnecessary closeness.

_(Unnecessary to who, exactly?)_

_I hope you see the world this way forever_ , his father had said to him - and, indeed, Hawkeye has always been proud to understand the ways that vines grow over a skeleton, wild and unfettered and nearly impossible to trace back to the beginning, and to understand what this means for how to play the game. _You have to cut them back_ , his mother had explained to him when he was small, _otherwise they grow too fast, out of control_.

This: one more enduring lifelong lesson that BJ Hunnicut has effortlessly and quietly upended without so much as a glance backward. _Tend to all of it_ , seems to be his philosophy. _The world will sort it all out._

Hawkeye re-imagines (as he does nearly every single morning of his life, now) the sparks shooting into his spine when BJ touches him, and then (as he does much more rarely) allows himself to imagine the explosions that would come along with kissing him. He’s out of breath.

_Why?_ Dream-BJ, with his wide eyes and swollen lips, asks when they pull apart, because nothing that lives solely inside Hawkeye’s head is 100% kind. Hawkeye gropes around for the words before pulling Dream-BJ’s body closer: _because you do nice things when you think no one is looking_. Dream-BJ does not understand the corollary: _and if even the things that you do when you think no one is looking are nice, I trust the things you might choose to hide_. To his credit, Dream-BJ keeps kissing him anyway. (To his much, much greater credit, Real-BJ would, Hawkeye suspects, understand without any explanation.)

Life seems to imitate art each time the conversation rolls around to secret-keeping. Hawkeye tries to tease BJ, occasionally, about the things he chooses to keep private - and each time, BJ casually establishes himself as someone who isn’t afraid of any light Hawkeye could shine on any part of him. It is, per usual, equal parts endearing and maddening.

“I don’t care if you read my journal,” BJ tells him frankly one night. Hawkeye thinks maybe it’s the loveliest thing anyone’s ever offered him. “You’re written into every word, anyway.”

Hawkeye knows a thing or two about writing roommates into every word of a journal tucked hastily underneath a pillow: _you might say I wrote the book on it_ , he would have cracked, had this not been a subject worth keeping hidden at any cost. What he does not know a single thing about is handing a well-worn journal to said roommate as an offering. 

He doesn’t actually know much, he realizes upon further reflection, about making offerings at all.

And so the vines grow. BJ seems to have been born to spiral outward, roots shooting down into the very basest parts of Hawkeye and leaves tangling up with the most peripheral pieces of him. What he learns is that he was wrong. Of the two of them, BJ is certainly not the simple one.

It’s an easy mistake, he reasons. BJ is a constellation of simple facts, when each taken separately: He loves his wife. He loves his daughter. He loves bacon - or purports to, not that he and Hawkeye have ever been in the same place together as a strip of real bacon - and hates sausage. He works hard, because he became a doctor to do good. He doesn’t look at other women, because Peg has always been enough. He hadn’t looked at other men in America - reasoning same. He looks at men - a man, anyway - in Korea, and though at first Hawkeye had considered this a very complicated piece of BJ’s life, he has - after months of close study - realized that it is actually very simply because Peg is not in Korea.

It’s the facts themselves that twist into something altogether unreadable when they’re slotted together, and when Hawkeye is the one holding them up to the light: _We’re in a war and you keep touching me and I can’t tell whether you’re gay or whether I just really want you to be, or even whether I do want you to be, but I think that I do because of the way you’ve loved people who aren’t me, and also you’re just really beautiful_, seems to somehow be the most efficient way to summarize the situation so far. Efficiency, in this case, reveals absurdity. Hawkeye is out of his league.

They’re in the fields playing cards, up the hill behind the camp, when it happens.

“I can’t figure you out,” Hawkeye murmurs on a dreary Sunday morning, and BJ responds to the fondness in his voice by looking up and drenching him with the sunniest smile.

“What’s there to figure out? That’s my gin card, by the way, thank you very much.” 

Hawkeye knows, deep in his bones, that when BJ asks questions like that with the sort of smile he’s giving him now, it’s a trap - a setup. Hawkeye knows in his bones that ultimately, at the end of all the scorecards, BJ knows exactly what he’s doing.

More simple facts: BJ is bright, a smart man. He is funny, going to sometimes absurd lengths to get a laugh out of someone he loves. BJ is a man who makes people laugh in order to see them happy, not so that they can see him funny.

“I just… yeah, yeah, okay, give yourself some points there,” Hawkeye stalls, as BJ scribbles down the score to what must be their six-hundredth game here without ever breaking eye contact. “Good writing, there.”

“They made me practice.” BJ’s smile never wavers. “What is it that you can’t figure out? _You!_ ”

And there’s the out: BJ, lovely creature that he is, has expertly woven a two-pronged question. Prong one is the response that leads back to the everyday, back to wondering. _You! - Me, I know - the great detective! - Well, good, anyway. - I beg your pardon!_... And so on.

Prong two, however…

“I can’t figure out why you feel so different from anyone I’ve liked before,” Hawkeye blurts, all in a rush, and as it hovers out there he tries to remember whether he’s ever analyzed an actual case of someone dying from embarrassment. 

“ _Well_.” Hawkeye recognizes the soft, kind way that BJ has of beginning to speak before he has any idea what he’s going to say so as to avoid a silence filled with crushing uncertainty; he wonders whether Peg also suffers from crushing uncertainty or whether this is a habit BJ developed specifically for him. He finds it utterly impossible to tell which would be more endearing. “It’s because I’ve got these bushy sideburns, you see?”

Hawkeye laughs like he’s trying to get all the air in his body out through a pinhole in a single surprised breath. “Are you kidding me?”

“Well, no, but I am extrapolating. Perhaps unfairly. We’ve never really gotten around to discussing your sordid college years.”

“Well, first of all, your extrapolation _is_ unfair, because if you think _those_ bushy sideburns are my first bushy sideburns…” Hawkeye stops. “Okay, no, you know what, I didn’t push myself into taking prong one just so I could immediately dial it up into prong two.”

BJ blinks. “I’m sorry. I actually usually consider myself outstanding at following your non sequiturs, but... ”

“Nope, it’s okay. Just a little personal pep talk there.”

“What exactly are you pepping yourself up for?”

“I’m pepping myself up to go back to what I just said. You know. Quit letting myself off the hook.”

“Yes, that’s your problem,” BJ agrees dryly, and Hawkeye glares. “Okay, okay, yes, yes. You’re right. Let’s go back. And I have a feeling I know what you want to go back to, but I’d like us to jump back even a little bit before that, because you started by saying you couldn’t figure _me_ out.”

“Best memory in the east. I’m getting real tired of the wunderkind act, my friend.”

“We’re going back! Remember? Jokes are over.”

“Okay, yes. You’re right. Let’s go back,” Hawkeye parrots. “And _yes_ , you’re right: I can’t figure _you_ out.”

“What can’t you figure out?”

Hawkeye sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. _We’re in it now_ , he figures, and takes a breath. “I mean. Are you gay?”

BJ raises his eyebrows. “Are _you_ gay?”

“For Christ’s sake! We’re going back, remember?”

“I _am_ back, Hawk. How in the world is that question not relevant here?”

“Well, I’m not questioning its relevance, I’m questioning how serious a conversational tactic it is to answer a question with a question. The _same_ question, I might add.”

“All right. Fair. You’re right. Am I gay?”

“I don’t know! Are you?”

“I’m _restating_. And I don’t know. It’s complicated. I’m married.”

“Lots of us are.”

BJ scowls. “...To a woman I love very much. And not in a weird spiritual way. In the kind of way where I really, really, _really_ love having sex with my wife because she is perfect and beautiful and hilarious and the mother of my child, who is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But!” BJ holds up his finger, presumably to stave off whatever panicky things are happening in Hawkeye’s guts. “It’s complicated, yeah?”

“ _Is it_?” Hawkeye half-demands: this, after months of imagining BJ’s straightforwardness as the thing keeping them afloat.

“I mean, yeah.” BJ gestures between them. “You. This.”

“This,” Hawkeye agrees faintly, softening. “This is the thing I don’t know how to figure out.”

“No kidding. I’ve been trying to work it out in my head for months.”

Something about the idea of BJ knowing there was something to figure out in the first place gets him exasperated all over again. “Wait. You knew too? And you thought it would _help_ to touch me all the time? Get me all hot and bothered under the collar all the time?”

“Well, no. That part I couldn’t help. That part is just because I like you. And Korea has really done a number on my restraint.”

Hawkeye stares at him for a few moments before giving himself over into giggles. “ _Really_? What the hell were you like in California?” He shakes his head. “Don’t answer that. Beej, this conversation is a mess.”

“This whole _thing_ is a mess.”

“As long as it’s a messy beginning, it’s fine.”

BJ frowns and looks pained. “Hawk, I...”

“No, don’t,” Hawkeye says, immediately and automatically, icy water filling his lungs because he knows what that face means. (A very bitter part of him wants to ask BJ if he’d noticed how quickly he’d understood.)

“Hawk, sweetheart, you brought it up,” BJ murmurs softly, almost pleading. Only BJ goddamn Hunnicut could inaugurate the word _sweetheart_ and the concept of total heartbreak in the same sentence.

“I know I did.” Stubborn until the end. “Because I needed to know.”

“ _I_ don’t know.”

“Well then why did you touch me?” Hawkeye demands. “I remember the first day you did it in a way I couldn’t brush off, Beej. I remember it. We were in Rosie’s, at the very end of the night, but you were coming off a sinus infection and you were on antibiotics so you weren’t drinking, I know you weren’t, but I was, and as we were walking out, you stroked the back of my neck with your fingertips. Beej, I felt it for days.” He can hear himself sounding pathetic.

“I remember too,” BJ confirms.

“Why did you do that, if you didn’t know what you were doing? If you were gonna be like this when we got here, why did you let us get here in the first place?”

“Because I get lonely too,” BJ snaps. “I have a wife, but she’s a million miles away. And I like you, and it’s not just because you’re next to me... if I’d met you first I wouldn’t hesitate to fall in love with you. And because I didn’t think we’d ever _get_ here, so I didn’t think it’d matter what I would do if we did.”

“Well, we’re here,” Hawkeye announces, a little glumly. 

“So we are.” BJ looks miserable. Hawkeye feels like every nerve ending in his body is sizzling, and between BJ snapping a few moments ago and the storm of ambiguity roiling inside him, he all of a sudden starts to feel like he either needs to get to kissing or get to fighting.

“You look like I killed your dog,” Hawkeye snipes.

“Not my dog, just my day,” BJ snipes back, and that’s all the spark Hawkeye needs, and perhaps this is why he doesn’t trust sparks.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” he explodes. “Oh, BJ, I’d never mean to ruin your day.”

“Knock it off,” BJ returns strongly, heading Hawkeye off at the pass. “Look, I don’t know why you brought this up today, but it’s fine that you did. The only thing is, I haven’t quite worked it out in my head yet, so I don’t really know what to _tell_ you.”

“Of course you don't know what to tell me! You don’t even know what I’m asking!”

“I…” BJ stops in mid-air. “I thought you were asking for a beginning?”

Hawkeye pauses too, mollified. “I mean. Yeah, I guess there isn’t much more to it than that.”

“I can’t do that for you yet,” BJ says, almost apologetically, and then he does a thing that is so cruel that it gives Hawkeye hope, because BJ Hunnicut is not a man who would do a thing like this without at least knowing the end, if not the middle. He drops his voice an octave, and continues, smoky and scratchy: “No matter how badly I want to, and trust me, I do.”

Hawkeye shivers and moves on because if he doesn’t his brain will fry. “So, what - that’s it?”

“No, that isn’t _it_ ,” BJ glares. “I just need… Hawk, Jesus, I’m sorry, I feel so unprepared for this - I just need a little time, okay?”

“Time!” Hawkeye says incredulously. “Time for _what_? In case you haven't noticed, time is all we _have_ around here, BJ, look around you! What are you going to do, call Peg up and just explain to her real quick that you’ve developed a little crush on your bunkmate?”

“She knows,” BJ mutters, waving his hand away in exasperation.

Hawkeye remembers learning to drive with his father, a man who, while not abundant with praise, is also slow to dole out criticism. The first time he ever pulled the car out of the driveway, he’d gotten the gears mixed up and frozen, not with fear but confusion, and in some sort of strange out-of-body experience he’d watched his own self drive his own car, slowly but surely, into the closed door of his own garage - accidentally, and yet fully aware of his actions (if powerless to adjust them) the entire time. After allowing a few years to elapse, in the interest of good nature, Daniel had later called it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do”.

This feels like that, except that in addition to his powerless self, he is also, somehow, both the car and the garage. Everything in his body feels too tight, and every single emotion - anger, hope, frustration, selfishness, desolation, humiliation, fear, wanting - feels like it’s been frozen. He feels even less able to understand how to react than he had in his previous “stupidest thing”.

“She… she. Wait. I don’t… you. She? I. She. She what?” he ultimately demands, gaping wordlessly. This, he feels sure, is the closest his brain has ever come to exploding. 

He also feels sure that this - _she knows_ \- is the most implication anyone has ever packed into two words. First: BJ knew, not somewhere deep in his core that he’d boxed off, but somewhere at the very top of his mind. Second: he’d somehow thought that this was information that needed to be shared with his wife. And then he had apparently shared this information accordingly. _Also_ , he had somehow shared this information in a way that had ended with neither of them - to his knowledge - receiving a court-martial. Finally, and nothing in the world could be important the way that this is important: BJ Hunnicut had not only found a way, but had deemed it _necessary_ to transmit across an ocean a message containing a crush on Hawkeye Pierce. 

“She knows,” BJ repeats, more gently this time. “She knows how… well, how I feel. More or less.”

“Well _that_ must be nice,” Hawkeye mutters, letting incredulity do the hard good work, as always, of screaming _Jesus I love you and Jesus I hope you love me too_. “Because I’m starting to realize I have even less of a grip on reality than I thought I did.”

“Stop it,” BJ directs, in the same bloodless tone he’d used earlier to head off Hawkeye’s tantrum. Somehow, even here, they are slipping into the same roles they’ve always had. Hawkeye has no earthly idea what is happening, but BJ seems, even here, to trust the sparks they’ve thrown around over the last thirty minutes.

“Yeah,” Hawkeye agrees, for lack of knowing how to do anything else. He’s quiet for a moment, and then: “You told your wife? About us?”

“Well, I told my wife about me. That’s the part I knew.”

“Holy cow,” Hawkeye breathes, shaking his head. “I think if I knew how to do marriage the way you know how to do marriage I wouldn’t have talked so much shit.”

“It’s all in who you pick,” BJ dismisses. “Look at this, you’re doing a great job.”

Many years from now, Hawkeye and BJ will each remember many pieces of this conversation, but that single sentence will stay with Hawkeye for the rest of his life. With BJ, he is so many things. BJ matches him phrase for phrase, and though he’s funny everywhere, he never feels quite as witty as he feels when his foil is BJ. With BJ, he is witty, and brave, and un-lonely, and heard.

This, though, is new ground. When he looks at BJ now, with his golden skin and his million-teeth-wide smile, he sees a man who thinks of him as someone who has any idea what they’re doing together, here. Which is astounding. And likely worth everything.

“So you need time?” Hawkeye repeats, slowly, and BJ nods.

“Yeah, I just… Hawkeye, this isn’t a line, or anything. This isn’t a brush-off. I really do just need you to give me a few weeks. I wasn’t expecting this… well, I thought I had a little longer. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Hawkeye gives him a crooked smile. “I didn’t give you a whole lot of warning.”

“You did not,” BJ confirms. “It’s okay. Sometimes we don’t know until it’s happening.”

“Isn’t that the goddamn truth,” Hawkeye mutters grimly. “What do you need to figure out?”

“I just need Peg to know what’s happening. Before it happens. I told her…” BJ blushes and lowers his eyelashes. Hawkeye finds him nearly irresistible. “I’ve told her how I feel about you.”

“What did you say?” Hawkeye breathes, before he can stop himself.

“Well, I’d spent letters and letters talking about you, and at one point Peggy had mentioned that you seemed like you were really special to me, and wondered if you were the kind of person I’d be friends with after the war. Which was about as clear a signal as I thought I was ever going to get,” BJ adds, in a sort of as-you-can-see tone.

“Right,” Hawkeye replies, attempting to strike the perfect balance between conveying skepticism without seeming dismissive. BJ, unperturbed, plunges on.

“So I said that I’d like for her to meet you after the war ends, and that I’d like for you to come visit because I’d love to show you the canyons, if we could figure out logistically how to accommodate the two of you in the same visit, but I’d understand if she didn’t feel up to the trip, and all she needed to do was let me know and we could just stay in, instead.” BJ reaches across to touch Hawkeye’s hand, running his right thumb across the outside of Hawkeye’s left wrist and down his fingertips - the first physical contact they’ve had since leaving camp for the hill an hour ago - and Hawkeye has to all but restrain himself from leaning deep into the touch. “I remember really clearly because the letter took me about a week to figure out how to compose.”

“And she got all this from _that_? I’m not… sure I’m even following.”

“There are these canyons a few miles outside home - my town, where I live,” BJ explains, as if Hawkeye might have forgotten what _home_ meant. “Whenever I’m there with Peggy I can’t ever seem to keep my hands off her, and I’ve never quite been able to explain it to her… just that I feel really close to everything I love there.”

“Oh my God,” Hawkeye breathes.

“ _Yeah_. So I waited on a reply to _that_ letter for weeks. That was actually the time I got the flu, you’ll recall.”

“No shit.” Hawkeye feels like the tightrope walkers he’s seen in photos traversing the space between skyscrapers. This cannot possibly be real.

“When I finally got a letter back she told me that we could do anything I wanted when we got home from the war, but that she wanted me to hold off making plans until we could all make plans together, because sometimes things get confusing. And then…” BJ trails off, voice thick, and starts again after gathering his thoughts. “And then she told me that she loved me, and that she was looking forward to hearing about any favorite places I’d found over here.” He shakes his head. “I promised not to make any plans without her, Hawk.”

“You love her so much,” Hawkeye observes softly.

“That has to be okay,” BJ returns immediately, and Hawkeye nods.

“Yeah. Yeah, Beej, of course.”

“I’m sorry this is complicated,” BJ tells him, in the understatement of the year. BJ really does look sorry, and a Hawkeye that wasn’t so exhausted by the most confusing conversation of his life might have been able to give him more.

“What’s to be sorry for? You love her. You think I’m okay too.” Hawkeye shrugs. “That’s not so bad. And hey - if this place starts making me begrudge you for coming here as somebody with this kinda love… then we have bigger pooches to screw.”

BJ scowls. “You are charming and horrible.”

“You’ve noticed.” Hawkeye bats his eyes, and the affection in BJ’s face crystallizes something in him, and he decides to be brave one more time today. “Hey, Beej.”

“Yeah.”

“I wouldn’t ever ask someone to do something like this if I wasn’t pretty sure they were it for me.”

“I know it, Hawk.”

“And I mean - I mean top shelf. Sun, moon, stars.”

“Don’t get mushy.”

“Right. I have a feeling that’s your job.”

“Don’t get cocky,” BJ warns, a shadow of uncertainty still drawn over his face, but the eyebrow waggle that Hawkeye gives him belongs in a museum somewhere and he dissolves into giggles. “Okay, maybe a little cocky. For now.”

“Lots for later,” Hawkeye drawls. A million things are uncertain and he’s really only about 70% sure he’s not dreaming this whole thing, but it’s the first time he’s said _later_ with this much hope. They will, he knows, walk back to camp with all the same careful distances between them, but they will also, he knows, walk back to a camp where tomorrow could mean anything.

+

The solution they cook up is that BJ will write Peg a letter and will then receive one in return. Hawkeye has no earthly idea how BJ could possibly do either of those things, let alone both, without tripping off a million alarm bells, but he also knows that for however annoyed he is with BJ, he’s not the kind of man who would volunteer to do something important without being sure he could pull it off.

The first letter will take weeks to arrive in Mill Valley, and the return letter from Peg to Korea weeks after that. All in all, Hawkeye is in for a long month - and this is without factoring in how long it will take BJ to work through what must be, when all told, hundreds of drafts.

(“Do you want to read it?” BJ asks when he’s finally done, folding the letter into the envelope. “No,” Hawkeye replies, flatly.)

It is long, and it is hard. The hardest part is being in this strange in-between place, where BJ is allowed to know everything, but shies away from even accidental touches.

Hawkeye can feel BJ growing short with him over breakfast, across the OR, in Rosie’s. _This is the farthest I’ve ever felt from you_ , Hawkeye thinks to himself one evening after BJ had flipped through a book four times in an hour, sighing heavily all the while, and then left.

“Want some company?” he’d asked, not even knowing where BJ was going.

“I’m okay,” he’d replied, shortly, and left the tent unceremoniously.

He knows that BJ is on edge. (“Nothing feels okay yet, but I miss you so much,” he’d murmured last weekend after six gin martinis, and Hawkeye’s heart had almost beat out of his chest in agreement.) The stakes are so high. _I understand. I understand. Just… please don’t change your mind_ , he thinks to himself, finishing his drink and lying down with a pillow over his eyes to block out the light.

At his best, Hawkeye just wants to hold him and whisper, low and soothing, into his hair: _I know, I know, my sweetheart. I know how unfair it is. Even if no one else ever knows, I always will. I know when you’re bad to me it’s not because of what’s in your heart. I know. I forgive you everything, every time. I know she would have been enough for you your whole life long if you’d been able to carry her with you into hell, and I’d never hate you for it._

At his worst, Hawkeye wants to look him dead in the eyes and say: _you know, you’re not the only one hurting. I hurt too. And as long as I’ve loved you, which is the exact number of days you’ve been in Korea, which is incidentally not the number of days you’ve loved me… for as long as I’ve loved you, I’ve been taking care of you, but I’ve been hurting for longer than you, and we don’t talk about that. Do you think it’s harder to descend into hell without the one you love than it is to know that there was never anyone to bring?_

For better or worse, Hawkeye is usually at neither his best nor his worst. Most of the words go unsaid. This, at least, is familiar: Hawkeye is not a man with a history of saying the right things at the right times to the right people. And so they dance around each other for weeks.

And then, one day, the letter comes.

It is, all things considered, anti-climactic. Hawkeye is actually in surgery when the mail arrives, which means that BJ has a chance to read it over several hundred times, thumbs stroking over the folds in the paper until there’s a real chance the letter may come apart. When he hands the letter to Hawkeye after a ten-hour shift, he points to the paragraph in question, knowing that Hawkeye has no ability to read an entire letter right now.

“ _Why don’t you see whatever sights seem worth the climb in Korea_ ,” he reads aloud. “ _Tell me all about them, and then when you get home, we can talk all about the ones that made things easier. Bring Hawkeye. I love you._ ” He looks up, eyes swimming. “Are you sure Peggy Hunnicut is real?”

“ _Quite_ ,” BJ confirms, rolling his eyes skyward to the canvas of the tent. “And just as unbelievable as I remember her.”

Hawkeye drops into the cot next to BJ, delighting in the way BJ doesn’t shy away when the cot dips and presses the weight of their two bodies next to each other, aligning their thighs together. He’s been waiting for this for a month now, but somehow all he can think of in this moment is BJ’s wife. “Would you be okay with her, if the roles were reversed?”

BJ’s silent for a moment. “The first time I wrote about you,” he murmurs, “was the second letter I’d written home. The first letter was twenty pages long and I made the mistake of including a lot of horrible things. The second letter was shorter, and I learned that if I included you, it helped her understand that no matter how much I hate this place, there are times I’m happy, too. There are even things I’m grateful for,” he adds, stroking Hawkeye’s forearm and illuminating a month of darkness in a single lazy caress. “Which is just… incomprehensible.” He shakes his head. “If I could imagine someone who made Peggy feel that way in a place like this, it’d be hard to imagine telling her to stay away.”

“You know what?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been thinking about kissing you since you got here. Really. Day One, I wanted to pull you across the table by the collar and just lay one on you. And I never really stopped.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve been waiting for it since you sent that letter.”

“I know.”

“But now, all I can think about is your wife. And I’m not even the one that’s in love with her. Or at least… not the most.” His attempt at a joke falls flat, not least because he suspects there’s a kernel of truth there: to love BJ Hunnicut is to love a man separated from his wife who would have never gone willingly. It’s likely, Hawkeye thinks, that in loving BJ Hunnicut so completely he almost certainly loves a small vivid piece of Peggy Hunnicut, as well.

“You’ll learn how to make space,” BJ says. His voice is striving for lightness but it feels a thousand miles away.

“That isn’t fair,” Hawkeye replies, both sounding and feeling very small.

“It isn’t. But you’ll learn your way around that, too.”

It’s harder this way. Since the very first day that BJ was here, blood has sung in Hawkeye’s ears every moment of the day: _I want, I want, I want_. When Peg Hunnicut lived in BJ’s anecdotes and long silences, a two-dimensional foil for the things Hawkeye saw when he closed his eyes, it was so easy to imagine her as a collection of handwriting and well-worn folded wallet photos. As time has breathed life into her, and whispered into Hawkeye’s ear that he would very likely love her, too, it’s become clearer that she has also lost something in this. And all in a rush, he realizes that for all this time, as Peg has become more vivid for Hawkeye, she been fading for BJ.

“This will make you happy, right?” Hawkeye asks, for the first time uncertain as he skitters his fingertips across the back of BJ’s shirt collar, playing first with the hairs on the nape of his neck and then over the soft skin behind his earlobe. BJ looks for a moment like he’s going to respond but then shivers, deep and racking, and Hawkeye takes advantage of his indisposition to continue: “Because if it won’t, I don’t want any part of it.”

“Uh, it will,” BJ answers immediately. “I think you’re making this complicated. Or anyway, you’re starting your complication from the wrong spot. You know I’ve been married this whole time, right? This didn’t start being hard when we talked about it?”

“It did for me,” Hawkeye confesses. “I think I didn’t totally realize what I was trying to get in between until I got an up-close look at your marriage.”

“You’re not getting between anything.” BJ shakes his head. “That isn’t how it works.”

“Do you know how it works?” Hawkeye asks, skeptically.

“Well, no, I guess not. I know how it _feels_ , though. I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that I know me, and I know Peg, and I know that there’s no part of the way I love her that will be impacted by whatever happens between you and me.” He smiles. “No matter how tangled up everything gets, I promise that I will keep you each safe.”

And so it comes back, again, to cross-beams and trellises. It comes back, again, to the ways that the guideposts of BJ’s goodness are staked so deeply into the ground that he could grow almost anything up into the sunlight. It will always come back, Hawkeye thinks, feeling BJ’s calloused thumb run over the ridges in his own fingers, to this.

“I trust you,” Hawkeye says, knowing that it likely feels like another non-sequitur to BJ, but as he catalogs all the times he’s seen BJ trust himself and the people around him to be good, he knows that he cannot kiss BJ for the first time without saying so. “Whatever we do, I trust you.”

“Thank you,” BJ says, surprising him with gratitude, and leans forward to kiss him, and there is blood singing in his ears, like always, ever since the first day, but today the song is new: _finally. finally. finally. yes, yes, yes_.


End file.
